This talk explores the history of the sand table, a purpose-built furnishing supporting a bounded, malleable, scalable space sculpted in sand and historically used for modeling military or civic operations in three dimensions.

Drawing on elements of media archaeology, military science, and object-oriented ontology, Matthew Kirschenbaum (Maryland) situates the sand table within a genealogy of speculative, projective surfaces such as “big board” maps commonplace in Cold War films such as War Games, as well as contemporary War on Terror imagery (24, Homeland). For Kirschenbaum, the sand table is relevant to both a history of projective surfaces and the origins of tactile (and tactical) touch-sensitive media whose contemporary apotheosis is the tabletop interface of augmented reality.

The Nonhuman Turn is the first book to name and consolidate a wide array of current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social sciences under the concept of the nonhuman turn. Each of these approaches is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a concern for the nonhuman, understood by contributors in a variety of ways—in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, materiality, technologies, and organic and geophysical systems.

Our predominant understanding of extinction relates to natural species extinctions caused largely by human actions. But in the 21st century categorical distinctions between humans and nonhumans or culture and nature are no longer tenable.

Today we also think of the extinction of cultural forms, such as languages, customs and traditions, operating systems, and public higher education. In the face of this extended sense of extinction, asking what comes after extinction is not only to inquire about the future of humans and nonhumans, but also to investigate to what extent the concept’s origins still inflect current understandings of extinction.

After Extinction will pursue the question of what it means to come “after” extinction in three different but related senses: temporal, epistemological, and spatial.